Distribution of Siluriformes in a river under the influence of a small hydroelectric power plant of the Paraná River Basin, Brazil

Abstract

<jats:p>ABSTRACT When a river is dammed, impacts differ according to distance from the dam under consideration, and sites closer to the dam are more affected than distant ones. Damming a river changes the flow and landscape characteristics, which, in turn, change the hydrological, limnological and ecological dynamics, such as biological production, species distribution, and ecosystem structuring, functioning and services. This study evaluates the distribution pattern of the Siluriformes (catfish) fish species near a small hydroelectric power plant in the Jaguariaíva River, considering three distinct distances from the dam: upstream region, reservoir and downstream region. Samples were taken with gillnets between March 2013 and December 2014. The abundance and richness of the Siluriformes species were evaluated. A permutational multivariate analysis of variance was used to access possible differences in species composition among sites. Finally, a permutational analysis of multivariate dispersion was used to assess possible differences among sampling sites and to examine composition similarities among sites. A total of 840 Siluriformes individuals were captured, distributed among ten species and four families. The highest richness was observed in the downstream region, while the lowest richness was observed in the reservoir area. Differences in the abundance of species were observed between the three distinct regions; the downstream region presented the highest species abundance (CPUE), whereas the lowest abundance was observed in the dam region. Hypostomus paulinus and Hypostomus strigaticeps were abundant species, but exclusively sampled in the downstream region, while Corydoras ehrhardti and Cambeva diabola presented their highest abundance in the upstream region. The distinct longitudinal distribution of Siluriformes observed in this study can be interpreted as indicative of the negative effects of damming. Our study suggests that building small dams may result in negative impacts on the fish assemblage, impacts comparable to those of large reservoirs in terms of spatial changes. It is fundamentally necessary to better evaluate the environmental impacts of small dams in the Neotropical region, especially because few is known about them and how such impacts are comparable to impacts of larger reservoirs.</jats:p>

Inventory of the fish fauna from Laranjinha River, Paranapanema River system, Brazil

“…strigaticeps were abundant and frequent from C to I sites. A factor that possibly has favored these rheophilic species is the presence of running water in the Laranjinha River (Cecilio et al 1997;Garcia et al 2020). Several species of Hypostomus were collected in running waters showing a substrate with pebbles and rocks Perez-Junior & Garavello 2007), but in Laranjinha River these species also occur in some places with a sand bottom.…”

Hydropower Functional Zoning with Crowdsourced Geospatial Data: A Case Study in Sichuan Province

“…Gwon-soo et al [21] selected 16 factors that influenced river and bank ecologies in the Daqing Dam of the Jinjiang River Basin in Korea, and graded basins by enforcing an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) based on the ecologies of small river basins and banks. Many studies have assessed the impact of hydroelectric development on river basins, such as the concentrated hydroelectric development in the Mekong River Basin [22] and the Amazon River Basin [23], with different biological and habitat indexes. In fact, the following indexes have been implemented: watershed runoff [24,25], habitat pattern [26][27][28], biological source materials [29], vegetation indexes [30,31], aquatic-population structure [28,32,33], and ecosystem services [19,34].…”